My son, I wish that I could break myself
into the song, the ancient one, that makes
you dance there on the continental shelf.
It rattled in the boy I was, and aches
now from the years. If I was it, not me,
then I would stay this sweet for you and free.

Like you I’ve loved Earth’s gulf-of-mexicos,
its thoraces of bug and throat of frogs,
the landings of the crane, your mother’s toes,
and all the glitz in Adam’s catalogs.
There is a music in it all. Wild, yes,
like voodoo drum, but soft as wedding dress.

Those red-caruncled ducks, I’ve even fed.Cairina moschata, or Muscovies –
damn birds with bloody brains outside their head.
And I have loved the salty mangrove trees,
the cedar, pine, and cypress. Loquats I
would love until their juice ran down my thigh.

But I have seen concurrently the rape
of all things sacred, full, and light. And you,
my son, will see it too. As men who ape
their fathers’ lust and greed can but construe
an earth in which to love is to devour;
to writhe in pain is just for lack of power.

Beware, my son, while dancing to refrain
of breeze, of froth, of bellowed ocean sound.
They may be watching – now – with their disdain
up on the beach – your innocence resound
and fling out what you hear to all your limbs.
Hate them. Do not take them at their grins.

The one who calls the waves to curl and crash,
amid the narrow clang of sex and cash,
calls too this always deeper, widening song.
Listen, my son, and dance against the throng.

How faithful to the incarnation you seem
hell below, heaven above, Immanuel between.

But for the stockings hanging there
from finishing nails
and the bejangled plastic tree to your right,
I would think that Judean mountain night
was running itself all over me here
in this lovely trad chic living room.

So tell me blank-eyed resin Joseph,
painted by some sweaty Chinese hand
while you pour that god-boy into your vision…

How is your gut?
Is it tight with doubt?
Do you believe her?
Mother of your resin God?

Tell me of the dream Joseph.
The one that made you shit your reason
faster than activated charcoal
in a blacked out opium eater.

What did you see that night?
Was it the nitty-gritty angel Gabriel,
weighty with the particles and proteins of heaven?

Was it some discarnate palpitation?
Like the shiver at the end of a long beer piss?
Wine piss, I guess, in your case.

Was it bad fish? I’m sure you ate a lot of those
before the miracle of modern refridgeration.

Was it the yank of self-deluded passion?
A sublimation of the panic of adultery, or rape?

Tell me of the other dreams.

Tell me of the times you had to
hold her wracking sobs against your chest
after hearing the whispers at
the market of “whore” or “cunt” or “slut”
or whatever words they use for
immaculate conceptions in resin Aramaic.

Tell me of the boy, Joseph.

What did you think when you first saw
the few crowning curls washed
with running blood and amniotic fluid
pushing through her immaculate gash
ripping their way down into dust of the earth?

Did you think there could be God in all the gore?

Or after,
when you spread her legs and ripped
your own way back to where the child was
and no one else?

When you walked back to Jerusalem and
and looked for three days
just to find his ass in the Temple
with his Father.
Did you want to hit him?
Did you hit him?

Or when you closed his tiny hands
around the knob and handle of the plane
shaping that first ox yoke he remembered
in his sermons?

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I love them with a stillness like regret.
And when they enter me I gather up
the consciousness to play them minuets
that loll in the Orphean darkness. But
my loving makers made me – simply – food.
I feel the quivers of their two antennae
discover me before they cut, then chew
what I conclude is justly theirs. For me,

I’m just a useful tool to please
and give a tiny respite in the droll – no –
grave work from which the ants must find release.
Poor darlings, life must take a violent toll.
So like a lover lying on the bed
I open slowly; gently nod my head.

Dear God, I know it’s much to ask of you
but please, please make this great big bag of skittles
have lots more reds than any other color.
In fact, I’ll boldly pray in faith that you
will make them all the red kind. Be it so!
But if you don’t and choose instead in all
your mighty sovereignty to cut in me
long suffering and test my faith and make
me steadfast, please, at least give me the norm
in reds and not, to prove a point, much less.

In the splintering rain
the old sheepdog sat on the dock
with hair like seaweed
waiting.
He did not note
the wood as it whimpered and rose
into snarls at every wave,
the few boats rubbing the dock
struggling to dry.
If the storm had let him see those two tumbling
blues trysting on the horizon, his innards
would not have clenched a bit.
Though he smelled a thousand times:
the rain like iron pots, the salt,
the seven generations of rotting whale
the rain could not shake out,
he did not care except perhaps a little
for the whale for he was hungry
and the hand he did not bite
had left to see
what some dumb beast could not.

Guillaume Apollinaire, an apple core
am I. Tell me, is this thing you have done,
your plucking of my tree away from me,
your violent “mastications,” as you call
them, is this thing so good that you could whistle
through my pulp stuck in your terrible teeth?
that you could smile, dripping juice, as youthful
bodies, riper apples than I, flit past?
Who, my friend, who could have suggested this?
Oh Holy Christ! My tree! My tree! My God!
To think she made me warm! To think! My God!
To think. That sunlight was and is no more
my food. That now, away from her, it dries
me out, prolongs the decomposing of
this core I have become. What bitter love
we had together. Oh what bitter love
we had…perhaps if I had given more…
But no. Christ nailed! The fault is yours Guillaume.
‘Twas you who ripped her branch away from me
You were the one who carved me into what
I am today and flung me in this field
Where now I have no purpose but to rot.

She sleeps naked every night
under just a quilt she fashioned from
her husband’s flannel shirts.
Retreating from a dream of marriage
stealing only smells away,
she warms.
Her body creaks and coaxes her awake.
She senses from underneath her quilt
that night has honed itself
and burgeoned into morning.
It’s then she feels the wrenching love
that sorrow and diffused regret have given her.
She lets herself be taken by it,
heaves the quilt away from her
and lies exposed beneath
the curling of the dust

II.

Opening her eyes,
She watches, with devotion and a touch
of envy
her bedroom windows
fling themselves into the morning—
brazen, youthful, foolish—
as sunlight, huge and gracious,
quickly waters where they meet
and fights to keep from bursting them.
When certain of their safety,
then,
it lunges in and crackles through the room.

III.

She pulls the weeds
from her tomato garden
which she planted where he died.
“Something in the red,”
she used to tell the inquiries.
Now she doesn’t know.
The flowers in the creases
of her apron bloom as she unbends
and then surveys with earthy hand
the property with bitter love.

She thinks in large, inchoate thoughts
that shoot out words
inside of her like:
“swollenness” and “light”
and sees before she stoops again
a flash of evening sun in bending grass.

I didn’t think too much about the sign
at first. After all, I don’t have the Faith
like a child. Mama said I don’t have faith
enough to trust in gravity. She’s wrong
I think. She didn’t know I just need proof
sometimes. That’s why I didn’t think too hard
about it when that book fell over on
its own while I was sittin’ on the couch
just looking out the window at the yard.
Just fell right over on its own right there
just sittin’ on the book-shelf. On its own,
I thought, without the child faith of course.
Before that, I was thinking pretty hard
about Martha, my wife, or Mama when
I thought, “oh man…oh man!” I thought. That book’s
been standing up since I don’t know when. “Boy!”
I said. I thought it might be ghosts at first
just like any would, I guess, but then
I knew it couldn’t be. No such a thing.
“Jesus is here.” I thought. And then I saw
the title of the book was Rock of Ages.
Now why would Jesus do a thing like that?
Books don’t just fall ‘less Jesus pushes ‘em.
But Rock of Ages? Jesus is the Rock
of Ages. Something’s wrong in that. A house
divided ‘gainst itself can’t stand. “Can’t stand…”
I thought. “Can’t stand, can’t stand, can’t stand,” I thought.
And then I saw my Martha standin’ in
the yard in just a sun dress with her back
to me. Just standin’ looking at the old
oak tree with all those tiny summer bugs
jumpin’ around her knees like they were curious
what was under that dress. I called to her.
Was then I heard the gun I bought for her
go off and Martha fell just like the book.
I never knew so many birds could live
in just one tree.

There is no one to comfort himNo shelter from the elements (including yours)No simple pleasure to relieve his toil.

Still, he sits in spite of thisdefiant.Quietly laboring in his terrible officetaking in the waste of this world.Keeping coffee cups from purgatoryonce their fresh brewed glory is spent.They come to him seeking an end.And he delivers.